Razorlight, Eden Sessions

Johnny Borrell

July 9th 2009

The white drainpipes are gone. After nigh on three years of watching Johnny Borrell strut the stage in white perineum-hugging denim so tight it made Freddie Mercury’s ensemble from Live Aid look positively clandestine, Razorlight’s enviably cheekboned frontman has retired his trademark britches for a rather more sombre black pair.

Once indie’s resident rent-a-gob, declaring himself a genius and “better than Dylan” (an assertion he’s since blamed on the music press for coaxing such hyperbole from its subjects), the only words he mumbles to Eden’s extraordinarily white, middle class crowd are an unconvincing, “Thank you Eden Project, this is great. Can we play here every night?” Whilst Carl Dalemo leaps around and scissor kicks like a one man Busted tribute act, Borrell refrains from scaling stacks, taking a lady’s hand and singing into her eyes, or doing much other than yelping and trembling broodingly. Their set’s heavily laden with material from their first two records, which is typically electrifying and punchy (new drummer David Sullivan-Kaplan certainly pulls his weight) but the four new ones they do play amount to resemble an act in the a very bloated Razorlight: The Musical. Borrell affects an American drawl for ‘North London Trash’ (the London yin to Nickelback’s ‘Rockstar’ yang?), stalking the stage with a wearily nasal tone, ‘Wire To Wire’ drags on about five minutes too long and he overacts heartbreak tremendously during encore number ’60 Thompson’, whose lyrics sound rather more fitted to Meatloaf. The band seem to have realised that there’s no denying that the material from ‘Slipway Fires’ is listless dad-rock, and so play it with the air of an intentionally theatrical homage to the genre; an act or a tribute, rather than with the self-assured gusto that permeates their earlier material.

Being one of only seven men in the world to have graced the cover of British Vogue, it’s possible that Borrell’s been paying close attention to Scott Schumann’s influential style blog, The Sartorialist, and his predilection for elegantly tapered dark trousers. But given the critical panning of ‘Slipway Fires’, the failure of their latest single to scrape the Top 40 (it came out in January, way before such disasters could even be blamed on Michael Jackson’s posthumous chart insurgence), their playing only four new numbers in a seventeen song set, it seems that in the spirit of gold old recession thriftiness, the white trousers are off being fashioned into a surrender flag of sorts.

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